LESSONS FROM MY TEACHERS

Those who can, teach.

For playwright Ruhl, life has been a history of teachers. From her parents, through her kindergarten and school years, through college and graduate school, to professional life, Ruhl learns from everyone. She shows us how even the smallest moment can instruct, how a child can teach a parent, and how true creativity demands a willingness to learn. This is a memoir of brief anecdotes, told by a master storyteller. “Every Saturday, when I was a child, my father would take me to breakfast at Walker Brothers Pancake House, a place out of time in the suburbs of Chicago, full of stained glass and massive Dutch pancakes. My father taught me a new word every week. The ritual was holy to me. He would tell me the etymology, along with the word, so I could remember it.” In college, she meets a great Classicist, and he remains a presence in her life: “someone who opened his home to his students; someone who thought the ancients had something compelling to tell us about how to live life now, how to face grief now. On a stone building on campus, these words are etched: ‘Speak to the past and it shall teach thee.’” Eventually, Ruhl learns the greatest lesson: that we must, in the end, become our own best teachers—that what we learn from others is not content, knowledge, facts, or frameworks but a way of living. “I think that the best teachers secretly choose to keep teaching because they want to learn their whole lives long—and they know teaching is their best chance of learning.” Anyone who learns and teaches will find affirmation in this book.

An elevating memoir of lifelong learning, told by a playwright who makes the past come back to life.